As is known in art, there are a variety of known Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools for designing Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) circuits. CAD tools are used to design circuits for various applications in the electronics industry. The VLSI CAD tools are used to place various physical and circuit elements for a circuit that is ultimately fabricated from the design.
Some VLSI physical design constructs, such as power grid elements, vias between power grids on adjacent metal layers, and routing grid lines have a repetitive pattern. These repetitive patterns can be complicated by so-called EBBs (Embedded Building Blocks) and relatively sophisticated power structures. In conventional VLSI CAD tools, circuit objects are represented in data models as instantiated lines or rectangles. This type of object representation consumes a relatively large amount of memory and has a concomitant long query time. For example, a known CAD tool may store each power bar, power via and each routing grid line as a separate entity. In actual VLSI circuits designs the number of these entities can run in the tens to hundreds of millions, which can limit the size and complexity of a single unit that the CAD tool (placers, routers, design-rule checkers) can handle. Moreover, the degree of expressivity for grid structures in some known VLSI CAD tools may be somewhat limited, which makes it relatively difficult to ascertain the relationships between gridded entities. For example, for some known VLSI CAD tools it may be challenging to determine which routing grid is next to a certain power line. This complicates re-layout and process shifting and renders it more difficult to use alternative routing grids for various width combinations.